Sunday, 2 August 2015

Blog Makeover

After updating my laptop to Windows 10 on Saturday night, I was feeling in one of those moods. You know the ones, where you are ready to update and overhaul pretty much everything in your life. During my commutes to and from work this last week I've been full of blog post ideas, yet, as you may have noticed, none of them have wound their way onto my actual blog. This was because they weren't full "proper" blog posts, more like conversations I could type out, and I didn't think they fit with my design and style that I had.

Old Layout

The blog layout I had was made for me by Becca of I Ate Skinny (a totally hilarious and honest blog you should read by the way) when she was starting out making blog designs. It was near the beginning of my blog that I got it, and as such I was a bit clueless of the direction I wanted my blog to go in, and of other things like SEO and which pages and buttons I'd like in the future. I've been itching for a while to modify my design, but I didn't know how, and as a lot of the things I wanted to edit were pictures, it wasn't going to be easy.

Decision Making

Then I remembered that Georgina of She Might Be Loved got a new blog layout from a company called pipdig a few months ago, and that she raved about it at the time, so I headed over and started looking. Their layouts are all so clean and simple looking, yet really elegant at the same time, I pretty much made my mind up within a minute that I was getting a new layout from them. After sitting with Rich going through the pros and cons of the different designs (bless him - the joys of being a blogger boyfriend) I finally settled on Minim and paid my £29.

Installation

As soon as I'd pressed the pay button on Paypal I received an email with the zip file of my new layout and the install help file. The instructions were so simple, and I found it really easy to change the design over. I had to delete a few of my old widgets, but it was easily done by just looking at what seemed out of place. To make my social media buttons there was a form to fill in with my addresses of my various accounts, and then another simple button to press to create the blogger widget. It was seriously so simple. Installing Disqus was much more difficult.

New Pages

You may have noticed my new navbar which follows you as you scroll down my pages. I've added a Leeds category and a Food category, as they seem to be the topics which I blog about most at the minute, these may be subject to change though, especially as I intend to blog more about my wedding, as it's getting eerily close now.

I'm really happy with my new layout, I can't stop looking at it! It's really inspired me to get blogging again, and I feel able to just blog about whatever takes my fancy now, even if it is just effectively a conversation I've had with myself. I hope you've all had brilliant weekends and I'll chat to you soon.